The haunting journey of 'The Boat'

Friday

May 9, 2008 at 2:00 AM

Stories are meant to engulf you and transport you to another time, another place —— give you a window into someone else's soul almost deeper than if it were your own. Such is the writing of award-winning author, Nam Le in his new release "The Boat."

Faye Levow

Stories are meant to engulf you and transport you to another time, another place —— give you a window into someone else's soul almost deeper than if it were your own. Such is the writing of award-winning author, Nam Le in his new release "The Boat."

"Truly, to read these stories is to travel the world," describes Random House. "From the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a fishing village in Australia to a floundering vessel in the South China Sea, Nam takes us on an incredible and masterful journey of literary virtuosity and feeling."

Seven individual "short" stories that are short in length, but long on character, depth and emotion; you'd swear that he has lived every one of those stories. When you finish each one, you will feel as if you have read a novel, your breathing will be heavy and your heart will be pounding as you return from a deeply personal adventure that has, in some strange way, become your own.

And so it goes with a writer who has spent much of his life writing poetry —— a poet who knows that a single, well-chosen and well-placed word can sometimes say more than a whole paragraph.

Nam Le, born in Vietnam during "that" time, traveled unawares at three months of age with his parents and 3-year-old brother on a boat to Malaysia, where they awaited, in a refugee camp, admittance to Australia. Still, he embodied that profound experience in his soul and it leaks out on the written pages of "The Boat."

He's never been able to have the deeper conversations with his parents because he is not as fluent in Vietnamese as he is in English. "It's an extraordinarily complex and frustrating position," says Nam Le. "That silence is an incredibly fertile space and part of what has drawn me to words."

Having earned an undergraduate law degree, Nam Le worked part time for a law firm. After about a year, he took time off to travel the world, "living off a bank loan facilitated by the firm's letter of guarantee — which seemed, at the time, simultaneously carte blanche and soul-sucking contract." Soul sucking because he realized that law wasn't his passion and he now "owed time" to the firm. His escape clause was to write a novel.

While he did pay his dues, returning as a full-time lawyer for more than a year, he eventually left to finish the 700-page novel that he now refers to as "a fat failure." Still, he found his parents surprisingly supportive.

One day, reading a review of John Murray's short stories, he discovered the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Murray had attended, and applied for the program.

Nam Le was surprised and thrilled to have been accepted and spent the next two years "trying to revise, streamline, carve out something that worked from that novel." Finally, he tossed it out. But all the while, "I was reading and writing short stories based on what I was thinking about, watching, reading, fascinated, moved by...;" It was a record of interests that were all over the map.

The thread tying the stories together in "The Boat" is the dramatic humanity, the poetic language, and most of all, the idea that the depth and intensity of human emotion is expressed on every continent. We are not so different after all.

And then, as if he were a fly on the wall of our minds, while we read the first story "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," Nam Le also toys with us. By using his own name for the narrator and bits of his personal biography he plays with the idea that we read things differently depending on whether we think they are real or fiction. As a reader, you don't know for sure how much is true, but your awareness of a few personal facts lead to assuming more truth and, after all, he used his own name!

To write about himself in half truths was "very strange and challenging," he says. "It was an indulgence on the face of it," but down under, it was an experiment, written with serious intent, drawing a stronger connection between the author and fiction.

Being "writer in residence" at Phillips Exeter Academy for the past year has afforded him the opportunity to focus on his writing without other concerns, an opportunity for which he is profoundly grateful. While he has met some of the students, Nam Le follows an opposite schedule, doing most of his writing at night "when no one else is doing anything fun."

"I've had a wonderful time in Exeter. And Dan and Elizabethe from Water Street Bookstore have been such wonderful friends and very supportive."

He is working on his next book, a novel, which will involve Thai pirates and a bit of time on the high seas.

Today, Friday, May 16, Nam Le is beginning his book tour in celebration of the North American release of "The Boat" at Water Street Bookstore at 7 p.m.

Go. Listen. Enjoy.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.

Advertise

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
seacoastonline.com ~ 111 New Hampshire Ave., Portsmouth, NH 03801 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service